Piecing together LGBTQ history is a tricky task given the covert existence queer people had to live with. Monuments or markers that represent queer presence are few and far between. Now a website is working to create those markers in the digital world. Queering the Map takes an interactive approach to being a queer person present within public space and structure.

By dropping a pin anywhere in the world, a person can anonymously write about their LGBTQ experience in relation to physical space. Founder and creator Lucas LaRochelle, a student at Concordia University in Montreal, wanted to create an platform through which people can explore the relationship between the queer body and space. “The project is exploring what it means to be a queer person, and the relationship [between] physical space and in particular, what happens when we remove physical space from the equation and think about queerness in relationship to online cultures,” they said.

The inspiration for the project came from a single tree in a park that LaRochelle passed while biking to college. “I would pass this tree in Parc Jeanne-Mance, where I met my first long-term partner and where I had also had a very explosive coming out of my non-binary gender.”

Stemming from LaRochelle’s intersecting interests in graphic design, wearable technology, and digital technology, they were inspired by this and other places in the city of Montreal that were important to them in terms of their personal queer history. Although the meaning of those points and places were concrete to LaRochelle, they weren’t to others — and therefore, couldn’t be recognized as points that had relevance to the LGBTQ experience in Montreal.

“Obviously, that tree was not legible as queer, whatever that would mean,” they said. “I started to plot out all the other places that held that significant feeling of queerness for me.” This thought process led to the creation of QueeringTheMap.com in May 2017.

After plotting 15 or so relevant geographic points, LaRochelle’s partner joined in, putting down some landmarks of their own. Then their friends put down points. Eventually the site’s reach grew to other places in Canada. Then they noticed that some landmarks were being noted in Australia. The count of listed points went from 15 to 600 in the span of six months. Then, suddenly, it seemed to catch fire, going from 600 to 6,500 points in three days.

That’s when the Trumpers found it.

“It was spammed by Trump supporters, who created these pop-ups that said ‘Make America Great Again,’ ‘Donald Trump – Best President’…” LaRochelle said. As a Canadian outsider to US politics, LaRochelle has a different view of the Trump phenomenon than we do. The way they look at it is that Trump has successfully brought out the far-right fascism in certain people, who then manifest his work on a grand scale. This can sometimes reveal itself as an attack on an LGBTQ-centered mapping project.

After the Trump event, which required LaRochelle to take the site offline and clean it up, they had a group of coders and moderators join their team to screen submissions before they went live. Since the creation of the site in mid-2017, users have created around 23,000 points, with at least one pin on every continent. The sheer size the project attained was definitely not part of LaRochelle’s original plan.

Part of the draw of Queering The Map is anonymity; users can express their queer experience or identity without fear of coming out or the repercussions that could result. As it says on the site itself, “Anything from direct action activism to a conversation expressing preferred pronouns, from flirtatious glances to weekend-long sex parties; all are part of the project of queering space.” LaRochelle explained the purpose of the anonymity in a heavily surveilled society. “A major tenet of the project is total anonymity, and trying to resist surveillance while still doing the work of visibility,” they said. “Trying to contend with the tricky zone that appears when we make ourselves visible; [when we do,] we also put ourselves up for surveillance. But visibility is an incredibly important aspect of queer activism.”

When asked about their favorite pins, LaRochelle couldn’t pick just one. “I’m particularly interested in the posts that are articulating queerness outside of a Western context, because I think often that queerness is constructed as a Western phenomenon, which is entirely untrue,” they said. They also mentioned another important aspect of the pins in non-Western places, which “are resisting a singular standing of what it means to be queer in those places.”

Queering the Map is an incredibly unique and important resource available for people all over the world. “Queering the Map came out of that urge of what could it feel like to move through an environment that’s animated by the queer past, queer present, and queer future,” said LaRochelle. It allows people — most importantly queer people — to see and read stories of those in different contexts and societies, and see that queerness exists in many diverse places. And almost more importantly, it destroys the idea of the single story, especially from a Western context, which restricts our understanding of the queer experience. Said LaRochelle, “I hope that Queering the Map contributes to the thought process [about] what happens when we can empower as many people as possible to tell their stories, as a way of always disrupting a singular narrative.”

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